Monday, June 27, 2016

The pattern I’ve noted of Roland Emmerich’s film projects warning us that space aliens may be tied to climate change continues, even in a little bit of the spectacular-yet-slightly-bland Independence Day: Resurgence, as I write in today’s column.

Saturday, June 11, 2016

For what it's worth, one disturbingly simple way to explain half the strange DC Comics Universe events of the past five years might be to assume that harried comics writer Geoff Johns was told by a studio exec, "We want to have a Wonder Woman reveal in the movie, prefigured in the comics, about one of her relatives being evil. Just make it so that her father is an evil god or the evil New God or one of the evil New Gods or that she has an evil sister or an evil duplicate from Themyscira or an evil duplicate from another universe or an evil daughter from another universe or an evil brother or her duplicate from the other universe has an evil son or her duplicate from Themyscira has an evil son or the son is the evil New God or the son is Luthor's child or is a duplicate of Luthor."

To which Johns said, "Uhhh."

And the executive said, "You have to do all that."

And they did. They actually, literally did. All of it. All the rest may be mere side effects.

And then Johns went insane, like Chinese scholars asked to adhere to contradictory edicts during the Cultural Revolution. And later, when there was a tiny shift in the corporate power structure, he decided to kill several characters and depict two of director Zack Snyder's favorite characters as cruel gods toying with the cosmos.

Thursday, June 9, 2016

With the Armory a few blocks from me filled with films of people defecating and vomiting in the name of art right now, it is an apt time to mark the 500th anniversary of the novel Utopia and the 100th anniversary of the Dadaist art movement, as I do in today’s column.